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維基是共同寫作的軟體
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我在網路上做的
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維基讓人能夠來到網站來創造些什麼
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我認為這真正的結果是
人們發現
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他們能創造些東西
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其他人甚至不知道的東西
但他們回去相信
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他們做出了使他們驚訝的東西
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驚訝,所有人都很驚訝
就它的價值而言
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HyperCard was a
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kind of a drawing program where you could
draw a bunch of pages,
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a bunch of screens, and then cause one
screen to link to another.
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Well, nobody knew what hypertext was then
and so it was kind of hard to
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figure out, well, what are you supposed
to do with this?
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And I liked that idea of having
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something that kinda challenges you and
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I like to figure out what to do with things so
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so I thought, well,
I'll make a bunch of cards
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about how ideas move through my company.
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An interesting thing about it was that it assumed that
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if you wanted to make a link, if you wanted a button on one card to go to
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another card
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you would know what other card, and it would already exist.
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And when I was asking people to tell me about
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how ideas move through the company -
they were always talking about moving to a company
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someplace that
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there wasn't a card for -
so I just made it so that
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you could type the name of something and
when you press the button
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to go to the link, and it wasn't there,
it made the card.
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And making it on-demand, when you
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move around a hypertext and when you got
to the edge of it
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it would just push that edge out further, and so
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I could tackle a subject that's
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unimaginably large - every idea in my whole company -
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but people who knew about ideas would
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just follow it around, they would go from card to card until they went to some place they
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got to the edge
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but they went to the edge because they knew about that edge. They wanted to see what I
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said about it. And my program said
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"I don't know about this, tell me something about this."
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And they just loved to write.
In fact in HyperCard, people would come to sit at my desk
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and they would want a demo of HyperCard
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and I would show them this program and they wouldn't leave.
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You know, I had a pet theory that
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engineers wouldn't use an idea
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unless they had seen it work before.
You know, that they were basically conservative.
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And so
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ideas were slow to be absorbed. And so, I was interested in how ideas moved around
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in communities.
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And that notion was more important than any particular hypertext.
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But we had held some conferences
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call it the pattern languages have
programming conference for Panerai which
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is a programs
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and had a hundred people come out to the
University of Illinois
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this the summer of 1994
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1994 yeah I'm
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talked about how we needed to write
about computer programs in a different
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way so that we can capture these ideas
and why people decided an idea was good
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or bad
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and then my friends said
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"oh, let me show you this new thing called
the World Wide Web"
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the University of Illinois right they
created the first graphical browser
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an issue in this community said
"Ward, we think you need to make
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a hypertext
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pattern repository."
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Well of course I thought, you know,
I've done this before with HyperCard
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and I just needed to move it over to the Web
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and then I wouldn't have people sit around
my desk because it was the web
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it was international
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so it solve that problem an could I
do
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could I could I get forms and I had to
make up this idea
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love mark-up
I had to account for the fact that I didn't have those buttons
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that I had in HyperCard
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you know it is different system but I
made markup in
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and I tried it and i sat there and I
started typing stuff in
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and it was as much fun as I remember I
knew it was fine
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to do in hypercar new people with me my
desk but I could sit there
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on the web and I said I've got this is
the feeling I
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You know, I pay attention to what it
feels like to use computer programs and
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it felt right. So I knew it was important,
I knew it would serve the purpose
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which I wanted to talk about ideas again
in computer programming
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so the audience I was imagining was
people just like me
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people were very surprised or in fact
sometimes people would
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you know, send me e-mail saying
"I don't want to mention it but
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you've got terrible bug in your system -
it lets people write anything!"
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or they would say: "You've got a mistake on this page",
and they
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would send me
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an email telling me what the mistake was
and what I should have said instead.
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And to encourage them I would just take
their email and and paste it into
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the wiki and then send them a pointer
to the page.
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I said "I took the liberty
of taking your message and
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putting in the wiki for you,
but you could have done it yourself."
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And I babysat the community that way
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for a couple of years.
The other thing is, because I didn't have any notion...
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You know, I encouraged people not to sign their words.
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I thought, you know -
your words, your ideas are a gift to the community
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and you shouldn't be claiming credit for it,
because then nobody else is
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going to improve it:
They are going to feel it's yours.
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So I discouraged that.
I used that a lot myself.
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I did probably 80% of my editing anonymously
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and that just let people feel that
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"oh, there is a large community here,
there is all this back and forth",
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yet it has a consistency, because I wrote a lot of it.
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But that's a bootstrapping problem:
I had to make it feel like there is a community
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to attract a community.
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And people poured in.
The other thing is that I invited
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the people with the most recognizable names.
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When they showed up and wrote something,
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they only had to write a page or two
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because somebody else, who was less well known,
would say:
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"Oh, he's here - I should be here".
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This kind of stroked vanity.
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I might have been wrong on some of this stuff.
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I mean, sometimes people feel that if they aren't
gonna get credit for that they write,
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they don't wanna write.
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But I was encouraging people to recognize
that they are gifting their words.
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You know, it's just an idea, and ideas are cheap.
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And when people would write something
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and come back later and find that
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their words had improved,
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that's pretty exciting, you see.
"Boy, overnight this got better,
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Who made this better?"
And it's almost a mystery, because
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they didn't sign it either.
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It's like "oh, the wiki made this better".
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Well, you are not used to
things getting better on their own.
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A classic thing on
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computer communication boards and that
at the time was
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you would write something
and somebody would spot a spelling error
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so they would say:
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"You spelled it this and it's spelled that"
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Because the only place you could write
is at the bottom.
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You could add, but you couldn't change.
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So you write something and you come back,
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and all you find is
tedious complaining about what you said.
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Now on my system, you write a spelling error,
somebody just fixes it.
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and you come back and
you don't even notice it was there.
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But you find this one sentence that somebody added
that really gets at something
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you were trying to say.
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So the positive stands out
and the negative is just erased.
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The nice thing there is if somebody comes along
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in the meantime and is reading,
who knows less than you
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they might find your partial answer valuable.
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So this idea that
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every thought is kind of a seed
and it just grows and grows and grows,
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It's been used very effectively on Wikipedia, but
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it was very important on my wiki,
which was really about changing the way
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people talked about computer programs
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because there wasn't anything other
than people's direct experience
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to fall back on.
So as people would write about their experience programming
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people would read it and it's
the first time they had ever read
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somebody talking about, say, being afraid
that they wouldn't be able
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to get the program done
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done how their change the decisions they
made out of fear
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or how they
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found a way to work with somebody else
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and find the thing that is acceptable
for everybothy
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I had to the aspects we we were very
interested in how computer programs
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could form a
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in an emergent way where we didn't have
a master plan for the computer program
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you say we have a general idea what we
want to do
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and you know some of it and I know some of
it and joe knows some of it
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and we're all gonna work together
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and just let the program grow.
Well
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you know to talk about something
like that which was unheard of at the
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time
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computer programming in an environment
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yet tax system in a discussion board
that had the same property
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well it was it was a demonstration at
the very concept we were trying to
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explore for computer programming
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and and it is true in computer program
we see it all the time in its accepted
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now but it was
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it was it was considered foolishness
when we started and now it's recognized
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is really the only way
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to make a really great program use my
first to a wine word
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that I learned as they were trying to
direct me to the week we keep us between
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terminals
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hand wiki is a Hawaiian word that means
quickens Wiki Wiki means very quick
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what's the very quick web it's always
been
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technically called Wiki Wiki web but
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when I wrote the script the CGI script
that made it
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work it was time a unique system and a
curse on UNIX you our issues
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abbreviations in lower case so I called
wiki
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that CGI in
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UNIX and so most people didn't wanna
bother to say where he with you it is
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called wiki
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and that's fine with me so it's like
saying I here's a system call
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quick if you need more mines
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you know it if you give 1 person knows
everything
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and making gonna sit back and really
think deeply
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they can see the whole program and just
write it down or or right upon
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you know I A you know poetry is one of
those things as personal enough
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you know did if you write a poem a day
after thirty years you're a great power
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and you is probably a solo thing
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but computer programs and encyclopedia
is
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arm a scale that you have to make a
collaborative effort
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and then to make good to make you read
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like it was from a single mind is the
challenge and that's where people have
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to
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learn how to complement each other or I
like see
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played each other strikes where you take
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you know what you're good at night take
when I'm good and we find a way to fit
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together
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to make like we won Super Man and that
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that happens it's it's not that hard
they resist I love working together
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where
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will agree ahead a time that
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you'll do this part and I'll do this par
and if you don't hold up your end to the
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deal
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then you know I'm gonna you know take
you to court or something like that
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that's this contracting
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style stuff and I think that's thats
better than competition
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but its it it is only works for things
where you know where you're going in the
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act
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know what the holes gonna be and can
thats
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a useful way to work but that
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because people who were finding
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computer programs they thought well
that's how we wanted to work this way I
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if I'm gonna pay you for six months to
run a computer program
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I want to know what you're gonna do in
your gonna do when you're going to do
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any you know
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and it was the master plan and it turns
out that
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that uses a small percentage is the
capability the computers computer is
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much better if you
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let it become what it really wants to be
your
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the best that you can make it and that's
a
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you know has a sort a sense of faith you
have to believe
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that is gonna come out even though you
can't say what it is I mean if somebody
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decided what the pages Wikipedia we're
gonna be
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you know to be any other project they
would have made it worst I've importance
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and pages and they would have been all
kinds of stuff that people
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in here that they would have thought a
you know I got this
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"grow from the center out" kind of dynamic right
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for a hypertext document on the web
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and that has been a model of sharing and involves
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you can learn enough about each other to
develop this trust relationship
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But there is a couple of things that Wikipedia did right
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that didn't even occur to me.
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For example, getting the licensing right.
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I was careless about the licensing and I think that
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saying "this has to be licensed this way, here is the ownership,
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here is the guarantees going forward" - that's important.
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And I just wasn't interested in that stuff,
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so I didn't do that right.
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Can you explain what that means, getting the licensing right?
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The openness -
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you know, I was open, but there was no guarantee
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that is was open,
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there was no agreement when somebody submitted.
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There was an expectation,
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but it wasn't written down. And in fact I think when I finally did write it down,
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I said I own it -
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you have the right to use it, but you can't keep it.
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And that's not really open.
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But I think Jimmy Wales' relationship
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with Richard Stallman got that right.
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The other thing that I just didn't think about,
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or I thought would be too hard, was being international.
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The fact that because it's licensed to be reused, of course that means
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the content is free to go into other languages.
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free to go into other languages
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And the fact that people might want to read and write
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in their own language - that international aspect is profound.
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In terms of actually having an opportunity to,
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in some sense, bring the world together.
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Wikipedia is probably one of the strongest forces
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in computers for, you know, creating peace in the world, in essence.
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That's fabulous, this understanding -
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to just believe it could be done in every language.
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When you find yourself reading
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an encyclopedia that is about the things you care about, because
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it was written by people just like you, talking about what they care about
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and that caring
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becomes so important to you, you trust this.
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Well, the fact (is that) that same sort of
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interaction is happening in a lot of different cultures.
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Now, we can talk about edit wars and stuff like that.
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But
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what really is happening is that there are people who are moving back and forth
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between different languages.
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People who are fortunate enough to know and understand multiple cultures,
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can, in this world, just carry little bits of culture back and forth.
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And when I read something, even in the English Wikipedia,
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and I see some mention of, you know, where the airplane was really invented
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or something like that,
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it's broad, in a sense,
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because people who have a worldly view
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- I'm unfortunately not very worldly -
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have shared their worldly view.
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And part of it is because they got involved with their language.
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English is a big one,
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but it is even more important if you have more obscure languages.
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It makes you part of
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one world of ideas.
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And that idea that every language is important,
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just as every person is important too.